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The Demonstration
Previous Chapter ***** June 11, 2017 I awoke at ten, sunlight streaming through my blinds. My head wasn’t throbbing, my brain wasn’t swollen, my hands weren’t shaking, and I wasn’t drenched in sweat. For a moment, I was relieved. The physical portion of withdrawal seemed to be over. I kicked my legs over the side of my bed, and pain shot from my left foot to my thigh. I examined my lower leg. My ankle was red and tender, and five purple bruises dotted my flesh like the fingers of a skeletal hand. As I sat on the toilet, waiting for the blood running from the tap to dissipate and leave clean water in its place, I massaged my ankle and relived, again and again, what I’d done the night before. I’d seen the decomposing, reanimated corpse of Kevin Gideon. He’d grabbed me. The bruises I could blame on my subconscious - mind over matter, stigmata and whatnot. But why? If Mathilde’s ultimate goal was to lead me to Micah’s body, what was the point of luring me to the place his body was, quite obviously, not, to be accosted by the George Romero version of the guy everybody, shaky evidence aside, currently assumed killed Micah? “Shaky evidence” was the point. I abandoned the shower, returned to my room, changed, and Google’d Kevin Gideon. ***** The investigators initially made a whole lot out of a series of pictures of little girls in swimwear found in Kevin’s AOL inbox. But later, it was revealed the pictures had been sent by a cousin. She intended to buy little Tiffany Gideon a bathing suit for her birthday, and wanted Kevin’s opinion on which one Tiffany would like. A few “local mothers” claimed he’d inappropriately picked up or put his arm around their sons. But no one seemed particularly bothered by that until after Micah’s disappearance. And when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. For all intents and purposes, the evidence amassed wasn’t even shaky, it was nonexistent. They didn’t have a squirt of fresh semen or a drop of blood. The cops searched every inch of Kevin’s apartment, his car, Atomic Video, and all they’d come up with was Micah’s red hoodie and inhaler, shoved in the same air vent crawlspace I’d shimmied through the night before. It was suspicious. It was, at least in the court of public opinion, damning. If something horrible hadn’t happened to Micah Wall while he was under Kevin Gideon’s supervision, why would Kevin have hidden the jacket and inhaler? Guilty people hide things. So why had they found the hoodie and the inhaler, but not Micah? The working theory made no sense. If Kevin Gideon had, in the time between Micah’s murder and the issuance of the search warrant, managed to hide his body so effectively that, eleven years later, not so much as a hair had been found - why hadn’t he hidden the remaining scraps in the same place? Why shove them in the archetypical Primetime Cop Drama Hiding Spot when, apparently, he was the premier body disposal expert in the county? He could have burned the hoodie. He could have chucked both the hoodie and the inhaler out the window along the 210. Fuck that, he could have tossed it all in the dumpster - the dumpster I’d used as a stepladder the night before. What kind of murderer leaves damning evidence hidden in a crawlspace above a dislodgeable ceiling tile? The kind of murderer who wants to make somebody else look guilty. I found a Pasadena Star News article detailing Kevin Gideon’s death. “Suspected Child Murderer Killed in Parking Lot Brawl.” An unknown man had accosted Kevin as he walked to his white Civic, two Slurpees in hand. Kevin told him to fuck off. The man fucked off, and came back with a Louisville Slugger. The 7-Eleven staff called 911. By the time the paramedics arrived, Kevin was seizing on the asphalt in a pool of blood and spilled sugar water, both legs broken, a gaping hole in his skull. Nine-year-old Tiffany Gideon had been found sprawled across Kevin’s chest, begging her daddy to wake up. The mysterious assailant fled. They never caught him. I doubt they made much effort. The picture that accompanied the story showed little Tiffany being restrained by a female police officer. Her face - bearing uncanny similarity to the rotting, worm-eaten face I’d stared into the night before - was swollen and streaked with tears, her light-colored tunic dark with her father’s blood. I’d known Tiffany. She was two years younger than me and went to a different school but, like me, spent many afternoons in her father’s shop. I’d see her, quiet and demure, sitting cross-legged in a corner behind the register, doing her homework. We played PacMan together, talked about Britney Spears and The Babysitters Club. I knew why Mathilde had sent me to her father’s shop. Why I’d seen the ambulance at the front, prompting my MacGyver entrance. I doubted I even needed the powdered concrete, now leaking from my jacket all over the carpet. No. I needed the demonstration. She was trying to show me just how easy it would have been for somebody to creep along the crawlspace, as I had, and leave Micah’s red hoodie there for the police to find. Someone, or something. The Droxies are servants of the Daemon. They do his bidding. They like small, enclosed spaces. '' My phone rang. It was Travis’s number. “Ansley! I thought you were going to come over last night!” Fuck. I had been. Distracted by the pressures of breaking and entering, I’d completely forgotten my morning discussion with Travis. The pictures. Mathilde’s pictures. “God, I’m sorry, man. I’ll come over in five minutes.” “I’m walking into Starbucks right now,” he said. “I’ve got the pictures in my car, though, if you want to come and grab them from me.” BANG! BANG! BANG! My closet. The door was shaking. The monster was awake. “I’m on until eight,” Travis continued. I decided I could do with a coffee. ****** ''I rushed into Tommy’s room, a bonfire of dread newly lit in my stomach, blood pounding against my wrists. “I can’t go to the concert!” Micah, explaining our plan to circumvent the AntWalkers to Tommy and Luke, stopped talking. All three boys stared at me, panting in the doorway, Nokia flip phone in hand, eyes watering. “I can’t go to the concert,” I repeated. “Lexie Chambers just called me. She asked if she could come over and use our computer to type her life science report.” Tommy raised his eyebrows. “And?” “And I’m in her life science class!” I practically yelled. “And the report’s due this Friday! I thought it wasn’t due ’til next Friday!” It was Tuesday. The concert was on Thursday. '' ''“That blows,” Tommy admitted. “Yeah,” Micah added. Though I noticed his lips curl into an involuntary smile. Luke’s eyes widened. “Is this the report you guys have to do about animals?” I nodded. “I don’t even have a rough draft.” “Who’s your teacher?” Luke asked. '' ''“Miss Williams.” I could all but see the wheels turning behind his eyes, his brilliant mind picking up pieces and constructing something new and beautiful. ***** “So why did you have these in your car, anyways?” Travis and I sat at one of the little metal tables outside Starbucks. He sucked on a cigarette. I dug through the fairly substantial pile of Mathilde Koperski’s drawings he’d found in his attic. “I took them to a friend of mine in Silverlake,” he said shyly. “She’s a psychic.” “Yeah, how’d that go?” Picture of Mathilde’s mother, talking on the phone and painting her nails. Picture of two boys in the old school playground, kicking a soccer ball. Picture of Mr. Lawson, Mathilde’s neighbor to the right, sitting on his porch and drinking out of a flask. “She wasn’t getting much,” Travis said. “But she said she felt weird looking at them. Voyeuristic.” Mathilde’s mom, in a ratty bathrobe, shaving her legs on the toilet. Andy sitting on the couch in his boxers, eating a bowl of cereal. Travis’s psychic friend was right. I felt like I was seeing something I wasn’t supposed to see. “It’s weird they left these,” I said. Travis shrugged. “We found a bunch of their old crap. Carseats, books, all that jazz. My parents never really took inventory. The pictures were all stuffed in a box of old records.” Girls playing jumprope. One boy tripping another on the field. Andy lighting up… something in their backyard. Me in my front yard, playing with a boy in overalls who I guessed was Tommy. My dad, pulling tools out of the back of his truck. “Whatcha guys doing?” The voice wasn’t Travis’s. I looked up to see Luke, coffee in hand. “Hey, Luke. Trying to solve a mystery,” Travis said, innocently. “Ansley’s being haunted by the ghost of Mathilde, the little girl who lived across the street.” I opened my mouth to tell him to shut up, a minute too late. Luke rolled his eyes. “Seriously, Ansley?” “Thanks, bro,” I said to Travis. Travis looked at his phone. “I’ve gotta go back to work. Call me later!” He stabbed out his cigarette in an ashtray and all but fled back behind the bar, leaving me awkwardly clutching Mathilde’s pictures as Luke took his seat, nearly shaking with swallowed laughter. “So Mathilde is a ghost now?” I rolled my eyes. “It’s just a joke. Travis found some of her old drawings.” Luke dramatically smacked his forehead. “Telling Travis about a little ghost girl is like giving whiskey and porn to eighth-grade boys. It's called enabling.” I giggled. Then the image of Kevin Gideon’s rotting corpse, hanging from the ceiling like meat in a deli window, flashed through my mind. “Hey,” I began cautiously. “I had one more question about Micah.” Luke shrugged nonchalantly. “Okay.” “How sure were they about Kevin Gideon? Like, did they ever look at any other suspects?” He snorted. “No. There were no other suspects. Ansley, do we have to talk about that bastard?” I forced a smile. “We don’t. It’s just… I feel like I’m caught in a riptide, and every time I stick my head up to breathe I get pulled right back under. I can’t even remember the day Micah disappeared.” “That’s because there’s nothing to remember,” Luke insisted. “It wasn’t a special day. We played in your backyard, we went to the park, we all went home. End of story.” “Alicia said we played in Colonel Lewis’s backyard - you know, my neighbor. She said we knocked down a pile of bricks.” “Sounds about right.” Luke clenched his eyes shut, then opened them. “Come on, Ansley. I’m off today. Let’s do something fun.” He grinned at me. I knew exactly what sort of “fun” he wanted to have. And I would’ve gone for it. Simply sitting across from Luke, knowing his mischievous little boy’s smile was for me, all but assuaged the recurring mental image of hundreds of gargoyle-faced Droxies crowding that air vent, dragging Micah’s red hoodie behind them. But just then a breeze blew by, dislodging some of the drawings from my lap. Clutching the remainder in one hand, I chased the fleeing three to the parking lot, where they'd caught against the curb. I snatched them up and re-shuffled the pile. A bomb went off in my head. I squatted impotently on the asphalt, staring at the drawing at the top, as an icy numbness overtook my limbs. “Ans, you okay?” Luke’s shadow fell over me. I pressed the pile of drawings to my chest and stumbled to my feet. My expression must have been batshit crazy, because Luke took a step back. “I’ve got to go,” I heard myself say. Luke’s smile melted. He peered into my eyes with a clinical coldness, then glanced at my hands. I was suddenly very aware of my greasy hair and blotchy, unwashed skin; the lingering body odor that hung about me like a cloud. “You’re not taking your meds.” I turned away from him and stepped towards my car. Then I felt his powerful grip on my wrist, forcing me back around to face him. His grey eyes were steely, sterile. “Ansley, you’re fucking paranoid. This is what you were like when we were kids.” I pulled away from him. Without looking back, I ran, threw myself in my car, tossed Mathilde’s drawings on the passenger seat next to me, and turned the key in the ignition. ***** Micah was hiding on the far side of Tommy’s yard, balled up behind an old barbecue pit they never used. His eyes were red and streaked with tears. “Micah, please…” I started. “You’re copying! That’s the same as cheating!” Luke’s idea had been simple. Miss Williams was a new teacher, but he’d been assigned a similar life science project two years earlier by Mrs. Leong, who'd retired. He’d written his report about animals that used echolocation. He had said report saved on a floppy disc. The plan was I’d read it over, change some wording, and turn it in as my own work. I could go to the concert. No one would know. I crouched beside Micah. “It’s just this once, I promise. Micah, please. Don’t tell on us.” “You only want to be around Luke!” “No!” I said emphatically. “I played with you on Saturday!” “Because Luke was doing something.” '' ''“Plee…ease Micah,” I begged. “You can’t tell. You’ll get us both in trouble.” “Do you like Luke?” That wasn’t the question I’d been expecting, and it was one I couldn't answer truthfully. Because I had developed a crush on Luke. And I did want to be alone with him. “No!” I lied. “I just really want to go to the concert.” Micah sniffled. And he must have believed me, because he nodded. I should have made him promise. '' ''On Friday, I walked into class - tired, hoarse from screaming, wrapped snugly in the memories of Luke’s arms around me - and turned in my plagiarized report. By two that afternoon, Micah told. '' ''I admitted to it, said it was all my idea, begged the principal not to get Luke in trouble. But he called the middle school anyways, and we were both suspended. '' ''Later, as I sat, chastised, on a bench by the playground, waiting for my mother to finish her conversation with Miss Williams and drive me home, I saw Micah. The bell rang, and his class filed to the pickup line. He noticed me. He walked towards me, lip trembling, eyes wide and pleading. '' ''“Ansley…” I wanted to scream. I wanted to kick, punch, bite, call him every bad name I knew. But I didn’t. I consolidated my anger, rolled it into two glowing orange balls, positioned the smoldering orbs behind my corneas. When I did speak, it was barely above a whisper. '' ''“I hate you.” Those were my last words to Micah. ***** I found Alicia lying on her bed, listening to music. I shoved a picture in front of her face. She looked at it, then looked at me quizzically. “Read the date,” I said to her. “What am I looking…” “It’s Mathilde’s. Read the date.” She took the drawing from me. It showed a boy and a girl, wrapped in each other’s arms, kissing on the floral-print couch Mr. and Mrs. Koperski kept in their living room. The boy sported blonde emo-boy curls. The girl’s long brown waves extended down her back, nearly reaching her pleated miniskirt. The pleated miniskirt I’d seen Alicia slip into for every high school party. “It’s the day Micah disappeared!” I shouted at her. “The day you were supposedly watching us. You snuck out to see your boyfriend!” Her eyes bulged. She stared, twirling a strand of hair in her fingers, until she finally managed words. “Maybe the date’s wrong…” “Fuck, Alicia,” I seethed. “Did that chick ever miss a detail?” Alicia stopped messing with her hair. She sighed. She rolled into a sitting position and took on a submissive posture, defeated. “You had a cell phone,” she said, with forced calm. “You and Tommy were in fifth and sixth grade, not kindergarten. I told you to call me if you needed anything, and you practically pushed me out the door.” “Well, you should have said no!” I snapped. “I was the kid. I mean, what if instead of Allister Park we’d gone to Atomic Videos? We could have been murdered!” “And you think I don’t think about that every day?” Alicia was yelling now. Her voice cracked. “It didn’t seem like a big deal. Then Mrs. Wall called and said Micah hadn’t come home and I… I didn’t want to freak out Mom and Dad. So I lied. And you… covered for me.” Alicia blinked back tears. Her obvious remorse iced my burning fury and, for the first time, I questioned my obsession with the day Micah disappeared. Whatever monster truly lurked in our midst, I couldn’t have saved him. I was being paranoid. “Luke was right,” I murmured. Alicia’s eyes narrowed. “Luke Andersen?” I hadn’t realized I’d spoken aloud. “Um, yeah. I’ve been hanging out with him.” My sister scowled, remorse exchanged for something resembling disgust. “I never liked that kid.” “What?” “Luke Andersen,” Alicia repeated. “There was something wrong with that boy, something mental. He’s the one who said he saw some…some monster, one of you guys’ ridiculous creations, eat Micah. After that, you started having nightmares.” BANG! BANG! BANG! The monster was at it again. Alicia didn’t hear anything. “Ansley! Help me! Save me!” Micah’s voice. Louder than ever. More frantic, more desperate. “I know he was upset and all,” Alicia was saying, “but he just made things worse by feeding you some bullshit fantasy…” “Ansley! Please! Come get me! I’m so scared!” I left my sister, still mumbling about Luke. I went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, pulled out a bottle of Alicia’s Gatorade. It wasn’t cool blue raspberry, but it would have to do. I wandered into the backyard, to the elderberry tree, still alive at the far corner against a wall. I picked a handful of rotting fruit. Back in my room, the closet door was shaking. BANG! BANG! BANG! I removed the wooden dowel and slid it open. Like streamers in a can, thick purple tentacles exploded. I closed my eyes as a wave of dust hit me in the face. When I opened them, I was staring into two pitch-black globes, refracting the afternoon sunlight in a malicious glint. They were stuck on either side of a glob-like, melting purple head. A mound of fatty, drooping flesh, pulsating, excreting yellowish pus. The bloated, putty-like tentacles reared like cobras, expanded like balloons, and… “SHUT the FUCK UP!” I screamed, dousing the disgusting pile with Ice Liquid. I blinked. My closet was empty, save for the Gatorade and crushed berries dripping down the back wall and pooling on the carpet. I smiled. Luke always kept me calm and warm and protected. But with Micah, I'd forged swords and brewed potions and lead armies. Micah made me feel powerful. I crossed my now-soundless room, sat on my bed, and pulled my journal out from under my bed. I flipped through my childhood storytelling, past Tommy’s colorful illustrations, past Mathilde’s rhymes and my attempts at interpreting them. I flipped to the end. I knew what I’d find there. Somehow, I knew. The message was scrawled in child’s writing, but not mine. It was the same handwriting that dated each drawing in my stack. YOU’RE READY TO COMPLETE THE QUEST. ***** Next Chapter *****